Page 31 of Necessary Cruelty

Anyone else I would just offer money.

I know from experience she’ll just throw it back in my face.

But I like to think I can be charming when I want it to be. Everyone can be manipulated, you just need to know what buttons to push.

Everyone has a trigger, even someone as stubborn as Zaya.

Her stubbornness might be one of the few things worth liking about her. The girl never backs down from a challenge, even when it would be in her own best interests to keep her head down. The last few years are more than proof of that.

I would have given her voice back a long time ago if she had been willing to tell me what I need to know.

Our past is a concern for another time, I remind myself. Right now, I need something from her, and our history doesn’t factor into it at all.

For this much money, I’m willing to forget about almost anything.

At least for a little while.

Smooth roadway turns cracked and jagged with potholes large enough to sink a lawnmower, which is how I know I’m almost to the boundary of the Gulch. Despite my desire for haste, I slow down to a snail’s pace around the broken pieces of asphalt in the road, because I’m not reckless enough to risk blowing a tire in this neighborhood. My Maserati would be missing rims with a ripped out radio before I finished the call with roadside assistance.

This place is a cesspit full of scavengers and the dregs of society.

My luxury car catches more than one curious glance as I roll down the street, random assholes obviously scoping out what they think is an easy target. A group of hood guys on the corner, dressed in slouched jeans and gang colors, seem particularly interested. But I turn my head and boldly meet their gazes at a stop sign, daring them to try something. Once they realize who is sitting in the driver’s seat, they immediately look away.

They need to remember who the fuck I am.

Even the gangbangers and petty thieves in the Gulch are smart enough to realize that messing with me isn’t worth the fire my family would rain down on them.

I still watch them in the rearview mirror when I pull away from the light. There isn’t a good reason to start a fight with odds this bad, but I’m not going to let anyone make me look like a punk. I’m not afraid of a fight, but I am alone.

What would they think if they knew I’m less than a year from being penniless, no better than the losers stocking shelves or laying roofing tiles? The power of the Cortland name is almost entirely based on the money backing it up. If we don’t own this town, then who the fuck are we?

I stopped questioning the seemingly unlimited power of my name a long time ago. People treated me like I held the power of life and death in the palm of my hand early on, and so I acted like I believed it. Eventually, it became a cycle that no longer had a beginning or an end.

Which came first: the golden goose, or the asshole with a silver spoon in his mouth?

When people act like you’re the center of the universe, that belief becomes indistinguishable from the truth.

They treat you like you’re important, so you are.

Which came first: the chicken, the egg, or my inflated sense of self-worth?

So I started saying jump, just to see how high they would all go. And you know what they say about absolute power…

It’s pretty fucking awesome most of the time.

Also empty.

Secretly, I’ve always wondered when everyone will finally figure out that I’m not much more than a paper tiger. The emperor has no clothes and a slightly above average sized dick.

Okay, probably significantly above average, but still.

Zaya is the only one who saw through me from the very beginning. A lot of emotions crossed her face when she first looked at me, but fear wasn’t one of them. Whatever exists between us is beyond something as simple as fear, and it only makes me want to drive her further into the ground.

Even when we were kids, I knew God had put Zaya Milbourne in my life to test me. I’m only now realizing that it might be a test I fail.

The parking lot of the Gas and Sip is barely worthy of the name, and I wince in sympathy with my car’s suspension as I crawl over the broken pavement. The lot is to the side of the building and its windows face the street, so there isn’t a place to park where I can still see my car from inside. I just have to take the risk that it will still be here when I get back.

If it’s not, I’ll just buy another before my inheritance becomes a figment of my imagination.

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